


it all went wrong. time to forget about it and dream sweet dreams.

by literaryFRIVOLOUSneophyte



Category: OFF (Game), Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Gender-Neutral Pronouns, Non-Binary Cecil
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-22
Updated: 2014-06-22
Packaged: 2018-02-05 18:07:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1827427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/literaryFRIVOLOUSneophyte/pseuds/literaryFRIVOLOUSneophyte
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Night Vale looks like what the Zones could have looked like, and Sucre and Zacharie are nostalgic for a time that never came for them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it all went wrong. time to forget about it and dream sweet dreams.

Sometimes, as the sun dipped below the horizon and reached out with weak orange and faint red hands to cling to the desert sand, digging into the clouds and squeezing out inky blue-violet blood that trailed away into the darkening sky, like threatened tentacled sea creatures in the depths of the ocean, living under the weight of thousands upon thousands of water piled on their backs, as the moon flipped idly between a pale pink and a fluorescent yellow-white color above the city of night vale, a man came to the station, hunched over from the weight of a backpack stuffed full of thousands upon thousands of secrets.

He wore a mask, and none of the interns who had worked at the station ever liked him. Cecil hadn't liked him during xir internship, either. He only ever spoke to Cecil, anyway, unless he wanted a cup of coffee. But even Cecil was suspicious of him, and xe politely tried not to grimace near him or loudly complain about him later to Carlos. Cecil's dislike of him originated from the fact that his voice happened to be...well, _insulting_ would be the word for it, but _mocking_ would fit better. Because, somehow, improbably, he had a voice that reminded Cecil of Carlos, and would have reminded Carlos of Cecil if he would only speak to Carlos. He had a voice that sounded like love, as lulling and brilliant as love, as powerful and intoxicating as love, and he managed to make it sound as _degrading_ as possible.

Zacharie smelled like something that had crawled out of the station management's office, unknown, horrifying, and he had, in fact, crawled out of something quite like the management's office. Although he never told Cecil where he came from, xe got the hint that he likely didn't come from Desert Bluffs, because xe didn't instantly hate him. That was something that built up over time. And he likely hadn't just rose out from the sand, because he looked more like he had torn himself out from a cactus, judging by the state of his grimy, filthy sweater that Cecil desperately yearned to wash.

Most of all, he didn't have the _feel_ of their world, didn't match up with their atmosphere, even though he seemed like any other regular slightly suspicious Night Vale citizen. He looked out of place, plucked out of a mirror world, except the mirror had tiny little cracks that distorted the parallel world just so that they didn't line up exactly – something lost in the translation, something off balance in the connection between two off balance perceptions of reality.

Zacharie reeked of something terrifying that no one could put their finger on, mostly because he never touched anything or anyone while he was in Night Vale - only the handle of the station's doorknob when he came to visit, with his mask and his backpack and his haunting, teasing presence.

Either way, in this world, Cecil's world, Zacharie was not short, or tall, and he had slouching shoulders that couldn't be distinguished as either broad or slim. Zacharie was not thin, but heavy-set, and his hands were these thick, calloused slabs of meat that Cecil thought were probably illegal in most respectable areas of Night Vale. Which all put Cecil's nerves relatively at ease, because xe would not be able to handle it seeing someone broad-shouldered and tall like Carlos speaking like a serpent about the reptilian secrets he carried in his coiled tail. Like the talking snakes that lived in the library dumpsters, which were banned and later confirmed to not exist.

Zacharie was, basically, an informant. He had the dirt on the mayor and the residents of Night Vale, he told things to Cecil that made xir stuff xir fingers in xir ears so the council wouldn't have to take xir in for reeducation again, and he went right under the radar of the secret police. Somehow. Improbably. Cecil once had a theory that Zacharie worked for the secret police, but xe quickly debunked it on xir list of “Who is this man, and what does he want with us? How does he know about us? Where is he learning these things from, and who, and dare I add where, is his m-,” which xe later shortened to, in order not to take up any more post-it notes with just the title, “Who is this informant, really?”

Zacharie was simply, and not so simply, too _shady_ \- not in the secret police way, but in the angel (the kind that don't exist) way.

After one of Zacharie's visits, after he leaned close to Cecil and whispered in his degrading voice, “Remember, you heard this from an _anonymous on-looker,”_ after he slowly closed the door with a soft click and Cecil let out a sight of relief, someone had to clean up after Zacharie. This duty usually went to the interns, which resulted in most of them disliking the informant. Another quirk of Zacharie's was that he drained the color out of the station, and the longer he stayed, the more the dark wood of Cecil's desk melted to a thick, soupy gray, and the velvet twilight of the sky edged towards the windows as if they wanted in, needed to disappear along into a monochrome nothingness. However, the colors were easily cleaned up and sorted out with a mop and some elbow grease. And a few minutes of unspeakable existential dread upon touching the areas Zacharie leaves colorless and lifeless, but that's nothing too unusual for the interns to deal with. 

Cecil did not remember when Zacharie first came to visit the station; xe thought xe likely buried the memory away or mailed it to the council for examination. However, the two had something resembling a schedule set up. Zacharie arrived at the most impromptu, convenient times, usually at the end of the week. It was generally decided that Cecil had no clue when the informant would arrive, but knew to wait a couple extra minutes on Friday before locking up the station.

Apparently, today, as Cecil started up the weather report and got up to check on Khoshekh, was one of the sometime days in which Zacharie decided to open the station door with a chuckle. But he did not chuckle. His backpack was missing, as well. 

“Zacharie?” 

“Cecil,” he said, sounding like Carlos's phone call about clocks, but also sounding like the mayor issuing a statement along the lines of, “It isn't _real,_ of course it isn't, did you really think _that_ was real?”

Cecil frowned at the heavy stench of _oddness_ that Zacharie carried with him this time, thick and heavy like xir eyebrows scrunched up on xir face, as if his odor had doubled in skeptical size. Then xe noticed that he had someone with him.

The girl barely came up to Zacharie's shoulders, even though she stood on her heels to look around the station. Her bright blonde hair, stiff and down to her neck, glowed from the purple light from the lamp on xir desk. She grinned at Cecil, and xe had a thought that she had a smile that looked like what could be under Zacharie's mask, or in a report tucked away in the files of the secret police.

“What a lovely place!” she laughed, bouncing up and down. She started to hop around the station, scrapping her nails across every surface. Cecil flinched as she scratched xir clean desk with a raucous giggle. The sound of her fingernails send a chill down xir spine.

“It is, isn't it?” Zacharie said.

“Who are you?” Cecil asked. In a more ominous voice, xe added, “and what do you want from us?”

The girl laughed at xir, but then abruptly stopped before the window. It overlooked the front loading zone, but she started open-mouthed at it like she was staring at a fairy tale.

“Wow,” she said. She walked closer to the window. “It does look like it, doesn't it?”

“Yes, it does,” Zacharie said. The softness in his voice startled Cecil. Xe glanced over at him, and his shoulders were relaxed, his hands unclenched, his demeanor less intimidating. 

“All the colors. all the...” she trailed off, and she lifted a hand to press it to the glass, leaning closer. Her breath, even as it fogged the glass, sucked at the colors of the ground outside, dragging them towards her.

“Purples. Cold blues, and reds, and yellows, and a sensation of standing on a cliff while someone pushes you from behind, calling you the maiden name of your stepmother. The Night Vale sunset.” Cecil stood up. This was something xe could do, surprised at the extra visitor or not – xe could narrate. “As the moon winks in the sky and appears with the eyeless stars, catching onto the inky blue-violet blood of clouds dwindling down with the day, like the backs of overtaxed workers retreating into their own milky eyes, as the sun sinks to the bottom of the ocean and can't choose between a weak orange or a faint red -”

“No. it's not like it,” the girl interrupted. “It's...what it could have been. Thousands and thousands of mistakes. What it could have been, isn't it?”

Zacharie nodded. “What it could have been, Sucre. What it should have been."

Sucre looked at cecil, her eyes intense, and xe felt the colors of xirself sucked off along with the ground into those desperate hands clutching the glass.

“What...what should have been?” Cecil asked.

“You kinda sound like the big ducky, back when he liked to dance with me,” Sucre said, and then she bounced back to Zacharie. He opened the door as she grabbed his arm; they vanished together.

Cecil saw Zacharie in Night Vale other times, the length between visits growing, but he never brought another companion, just as xe never questioned where Sucre had gone, assuming she had possibly died gruesomely like people tended to do. Xe did, however, notice that Zacharie looked out the window more, sighed more, and asked about the weather every month or so. Eventually he would stop coming altogether, and Friday nights Cecil would no longer wait for the doorknob to turn and the interns wouldn't have to prepare themselves to clean up. 

“Good night,” xe said to the closed door.


End file.
